Maher KayalMaher Kayal received M.S. and Ph.D degrees in electrical engineering from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland) in 1983 and 1989 respectively. He has been with the Electronics laboratories of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland) since 1990, where he is currently a professor and director of the Energy Management and Sustainability" section. He has published many scientific papers, coauthor of three text books dedicated to mixed-mode CMOS design and he holds eleven patents. His technical contributions have been in the area of analog and Mixed-signal circuits design including highly linear and tunable sensors microsystems, signal processing and green energy management.
Prizes and Honors
Electronics Letters journal Premium Award 2013,
Outstanding Paper Award? IEEE Mixdes 2013
Basil Papadias paper Award, IEEE Powertech 2013
Best Paper Awards, Mixdes 2013
Best Paper Awards, ICCAS 2012
Outstanding Paper Award- IEEE Mixdes 2012.
Poland Section IEEE ED Chapter special award in 2011.
Credit Suisse Award for Best Teaching- 2009.
The William M. Portnoy Award at the Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition , California Sept 2009.
Best Paper Award - IEEE-Mixdes 2009.
High Quality Paper - IEEE Power Tech Conference June 2009.
Best Paper Award - IEEE-Mixdes 2007.
Best Paper Award - IEEE-TTTC International Conference on Automation, Quality and Testing, Robotics - 2006.
Best Application Specific Integrated Circuit at the International European Design and Test Conference ED&TC - 1997.
Ascom Award for the Best Work in Telecommunication Fields 1990.
Publications Books.
Books:
Methodology for the Digital Calibration of Analog Circuits and Systems, Marc Pastre & Maher Kayal. Springer Publisher- (ISBN 1-4020-4252-3)-2006.
Structured Analog CMOS Design, Danica Stefanovic & Maher Kayal. Springer Publisher-(ISBN 978-1-4020-8572-7)-2008.
Linear CMOS RF Amplifiers for Wireless Applications, Maher Kayal, Springer Publisher. (ISBN 978-90-481-9360-8)-2010.
Coeditor of Microelectronics Education Kluwer Academic Publishers. (ISBN 1-4020-2072-4). -2004.
Giovanni De MicheliExpertise
Design technologies for integrated systems on silicon, such as synthesis, hw/sw codesign and low-power design, as well as systems on heterogeneous platforms including electrical and biological components.
Scientific Director of EcoCloud Center at EPFL
Directing activities towards creating sustainable computation including AI.Designing energy-savvy data centers and edge devices.
More information
Please read http://si2.epfl.ch/~demichel/
Giovanni De Micheli is a research scientist in electronics and Pierre-André FarinePierre-André Farine received the Doctoral and Engineering Degrees in Microtechnology from University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, respectively in 1984 and 1978, and the Engineering in Microtechnology from ETS Le Locle in 1974.
He was working 17 years for the Swiss watch industries (Swatch Group), including developments for high-tech products, such as pager watches, watches including integrated sensors such as pressure, compass, altimeter and temperature sensors for Tissot. He was also involved in prototypes developments for watches including GPS and cellular GSM phones.
Since 8 years, he is Professor in Electronics and Signal Processing at the Institute of Microtechnology IMT, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Full professor at EPFL since January 1st, 2009, he works in the field of low-power integrated products for portable devices, including microelectronics for wireless telecommunications, UWB and GNSS systems. He is Head of the Electronics and Signal Processing Laboratory ESPLAB of the EPFL IMT-NE. His laboratory works also for video and audio compression algorithms and their implementation in low power integrated circuits.
François MaréchalPh D. in engineering Chemical process engineer
Researcher and lecturer in the field of computer aided process and energy systems engineering.
Lecturer in the mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and environmental sciences engineering in EPFL.
I'm responsible for the Minor in Energy of EPFL and I'm involved in 3 projects of the Competence Center in Energy and Mobility (2nd generation biofuel, Wood SOFC, and gas turbine development with CO2 mitigation) in which i'm contributing to the energy conversion system design and optimisation.
Short summary of my scientific carrer
After a graduation in chemical engineering from the University of Liège, I have obtained a Ph. D. from the University of Liège in the LASSC laboratory of Prof. Kalitventzeff (former president of the European working party on computer aided process engineering). This laboratory was one of the pioneering laboratory in the field of Computer Aided Process Engineering.
In the group of Professor Kalitventzeff, I have worked on the development and the applications of data reconciliation, process modelling and optimisation techniques in the chemical process industry, my experience ranges from nuclear power stations to chemical plants. In the LASSC, I have been responsible from the developments in the field of rational use of energy in the industry. My first research topic has been the methodological development of process integration techniques, combining the use of pinch based methods and of mathematical programming: e.g. for the design of multiperiod heat exchanger networks or Mixed integer non linear programming techniques for the optimal management of utility systems. Fronted with applications in the industry, my work then mainly concentrated on the optimal integration of utility systems considering not only the energy requirements but the cost of the energy requirements and the energy conversion systems. I developed methods for analysing and integrating the utility system, the steam networks, combustion (including waste fuel), gas turbines or other advanced energy conversion systems (cogeneration, refrigeration and heat). The techniques applied uses operation research tools like mixed integer linear programming and exergy analysis. In order to evaluate the results of the utility integration, a new graphical method for representing the integration of the utility systems has been developed. By the use of MILP techniques, the method developed for the utility integration has been extended to handled site scale problems, to incorporate environmental constraints and reduce the water usage. This method (the Effect Modelling and Optimisation method) has been successfully applied to the chemical plants industry, the pulp and paper industry and the power plant. Instead of focusing on academic problems, I mainly developed my research based on industrial applications that lead to valuable and applicable patented results. Recently the methods developed have been extended to realise the thermoeconomic optimisation of integrated systems like fuel cells. My present R&D work concerns the application of multi-objective optimisation strategies in the design of processes and integrated energy conversion systems.
Since 2001, Im working in the Industrial Energy Systems Laboratory (LENI) of Ecole Polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) where Im leading the R&D activities in the field of Computer Aided Analysis and Design of Industrial Energy Systems with a major focus on sustainable energy conversion system development using thermo-economic optimisation methodologies. A part from the application and the development of process integration techniques, that remains my major field of expertise, the applications concern :
Rational use of water and energy in Industrial processes and industrial production sites : projects with NESTLE, EDF, VEOLIA and Borregaard (pulp and paper).Energy conversion and process design : biofuels from waste biomass (with GASNAT, EGO and PSI), water dessalination and waste water treatment plant (VEOLIA), power plant design (ALSTOM), Energy conversion from geothermal sources (BFE). Integrated energy systems in urban areas : together with SCANE and SIG (GE) and IEA annexe 42 for micro-cogeneration systems.
I as well contributed to the definition of the 2000 Watt society and to studies concerning the emergence of green technologies on the market in the frame of the Alliance for Global Sustainability.
Pascal FrossardTeaching & PhD PhD Students Yiming Qin, Alba Carballo Castro, Elisa Messori, Ke Wang, Sevda Ögüt, Tuna Alikasifoglu, William Cappelletti, Manuel Madeira, Mahdi Amiri, Ortal Yona Senouf, Vasiliki Rizou, Cem Bilaloglu, Abdellah Rahmani, Amel Abdelraheem, Jérémy Jean Philippe Baffou, Adam Hazimeh, Vincent Jung, Yike Zhao Past EPFL PhD Students Dan Jurca, Jean-Paul Wagner, Ivana Radulovic, Ivana Tosic, Effrosyni Kokiopoulou, Zafer Arican, Vijayaraghavan Thirumalai, Tamara Tosic, Eirina Bourtsoulatze, Elif Vur
Pierre VandergheynstPierre Vandergheynst received the M.S. degree in physics and the Ph.D. degree in mathematical physics from the Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, in 1995 and 1998, respectively. From 1998 to 2001, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Signal Processing Laboratory, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland. He was Assistant Professor at EPFL (2002-2007), where he is now a Full Professor of Electrical Engineering and, by courtesy, of Computer and Communication Sciences. As of 2015, Prof. Vandergheynst serves as EPFL’s Vice-Provost for Education. His research focuses on harmonic analysis, sparse approximations and mathematical data processing in general with applications covering signal, image and high dimensional data processing, computer vision, machine learning, data science and graph-based data processing. He was co-Editor-in-Chief of Signal Processing (2002-2006), Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2007-2011), the flagship journal of the signal processing community and currently serves as Associate Editor of Computer Vision and Image Understanding and SIAM Imaging Sciences. He has been on the Technical Committee of various conferences, serves on the steering committee of the SPARS workshop and was co-General Chairman of the EUSIPCO 2008 conference. Pierre Vandergheynst is the author or co-author of more than 70 journal papers, one monograph and several book chapters. He has received two IEEE best paper awards. Professor Vandergheynst is a laureate of the Apple 2007 ARTS award and of the 2009-2010 De Boelpaepe prize of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Belgium.
Henry MarkramHenry Markram started a dual scientific and medical career at the University of Cape Town, in South Africa. His scientific work in the 80s revealed the polymodal receptive fields of pontomedullary reticular formation neurons in vivo and how acetylcholine re-organized these sensory maps.
He moved to Israel in 1988 and obtained his PhD at the Weizmann Institute where he discovered a link between acetylcholine and memory mechanisms by being the first to show that acetylcholine modulates the NMDA receptor in vitro studies, and thereby gates which synapses can undergo synaptic plasticity. He was also the first to characterize the electrical and anatomical properties of the cholinergic neurons in the medial septum diagonal band.
He carried out a first postdoctoral study as a Fulbright Scholar at the NIH, on the biophysics of ion channels on synaptic vesicles using sub-fractionation methods to isolate synaptic vesicles and patch-clamp recordings to characterize the ion channels. He carried out a second postdoctoral study at the Max Planck Institute, as a Minerva Fellow, where he discovered that individual action potentials propagating back into dendrites also cause pulsed influx of Ca2 into the dendrites and found that sub-threshold activity could also activated a low threshold Ca2 channel. He developed a model to show how different types of electrical activities can divert Ca2 to activate different intracellular targets depending on the speed of Ca2 influx an insight that helps explain how Ca2 acts as a universal second messenger. His most well known discovery is that of the millisecond watershed to judge the relevance of communication between neurons marked by the back-propagating action potential. This phenomenon is now called Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP), which many laboratories around the world have subsequently found in multiple brain regions and many theoreticians have incorporated as a learning rule. At the Max-Planck he also started exploring the micro-anatomical and physiological principles of the different neurons of the neocortex and of the mono-synaptic connections that they form - the first step towards a systematic reverse engineering of the neocortical microcircuitry to derive the blue prints of the cortical column in a manner that would allow computer model reconstruction.
He received a tenure track position at the Weizmann Institute where he continued the reverse engineering studies and also discovered a number of core principles of the structural and functional organization such as differential signaling onto different neurons, models of dynamic synapses with Misha Tsodyks, the computational functions of dynamic synapses, and how GABAergic neurons map onto interneurons and pyramidal neurons. A major contribution during this period was his discovery of Redistribution of Synaptic Efficacy (RSE), where he showed that co-activation of neurons does not only alter synaptic strength, but also the dynamics of transmission. At the Weizmann, he also found the tabula rasa principle which governs the random structural connectivity between pyramidal neurons and a non-random functional connectivity due to target selection. Markram also developed a novel computation framework with Wolfgang Maass to account for the impact of multiple time constants in neurons and synapses on information processing called liquid computing or high entropy computing.
In 2002, he was appointed Full professor at the EPFL where he founded and directed the Brain Mind Institute. During this time Markram continued his reverse engineering approaches and developed a series of new technologies to allow large-scale multi-neuron patch-clamp studies. Markrams lab discovered a novel microcircuit plasticity phenomenon where connections are formed and eliminated in a Darwinian manner as apposed to where synapses are strengthening or weakened as found for LTP. This was the first demonstration that neural circuits are constantly being re-wired and excitation can boost the rate of re-wiring.
At the EPFL he also completed the much of the reverse engineering studies on the neocortical microcircuitry, revealing deeper insight into the circuit design and built databases of the blue-print of the cortical column. In 2005 he used these databases to launched the Blue Brain Project. The BBP used IBMs most advanced supercomputers to reconstruct a detailed computer model of the neocortical column composed of 10000 neurons, more than 340 different types of neurons distributed according to a layer-based recipe of composition and interconnected with 30 million synapses (6 different types) according to synaptic mapping recipes. The Blue Brain team built dozens of applications that now allow automated reconstruction, simulation, visualization, analysis and calibration of detailed microcircuits. This Proof of Concept completed, Markrams lab has now set the agenda towards whole brain and molecular modeling.
With an in depth understanding of the neocortical microcircuit, Markram set a path to determine how the neocortex changes in Autism. He found hyper-reactivity due to hyper-connectivity in the circuitry and hyper-plasticity due to hyper-NMDA expression. Similar findings in the Amygdala together with behavioral evidence that the animal model of autism expressed hyper-fear led to the novel theory of Autism called the Intense World Syndrome proposed by Henry and Kamila Markram. The Intense World Syndrome claims that the brain of an Autist is hyper-sensitive and hyper-plastic which renders the world painfully intense and the brain overly autonomous. The theory is acquiring rapid recognition and many new studies have extended the findings to other brain regions and to other models of autism.
Markram aims to eventually build detailed computer models of brains of mammals to pioneer simulation-based research in the neuroscience which could serve to aggregate, integrate, unify and validate our knowledge of the brain and to use such a facility as a new tool to explore the emergence of intelligence and higher cognitive functions in the brain, and explore hypotheses of diseases as well as treatments.
